‘He’s clean, as far as I know,’ said George amiably. ‘When on Thursday? Just a little job involving a motor-bike, nothing special on him, just eliminating the barely-possibles.’
‘He was in in the middle of the afternoon. I remember young Sid asked him what he was doing romping around in working hours, and he said he had three extra days saved up from the summer holidays, and was taking ’em before the weather broke altogether.’
George digested this with a prickle of satisfaction stirring his scalp. He fished out from his wallet one of the barely-dry copies the police photographer had made him from Annet’s photograph.
‘What poor girl’s he standing up for what other poor girl, these days?’
‘Mate,’ said Hopton, very dryly indeed, ‘you got it wrong. These days the girls ain’t surplus round here like they used to be. It’s the men who get stood up, even the ones with three-fifties. And if they don’t like it, they know what they can do. They’re relieved if they can get a girl to go steady, they lay off the tricks unless they want to be left high and dry.’
‘You’re not telling me young Geoff’s got a steady?’
‘Hasn’t he, though! Wouldn’t dare call Martha Blount anything but steady, would you?’
‘No,’ owned George freely, ‘I wouldn’t!’ If Martha Blount meant marriage, the odds were that she wasn’t wasting her time. There were still Blounts round the Hallowmount, nearly three centuries after Tabby blundered in and out of fairyland. ‘How long’s this been going on?’
‘Few weeks now, but it’s got a permanent look about it.’
‘Ever seen him with this one? Before or since.’ George showed the grave and daunting face, the straight, wide eyes that made it seem a desecration to mention her in such light and current terms.
‘Oh, I know her. That’s the old schoolmaster’s girl, from up the other valley. Used to teach my nephew, he did, they nearly drove him up the wall before he got out of it and moved to Fairford. She’s a beauty, that one,’ he said fondly, tilting his head appreciatively over Annet’s picture. ‘No, I’ve never seen her with Geoff Westcott. Wouldn’t expect to, neither.’
No, and of course they’d know that, whether they ever acknowledged it or not, and take care not to affront the village’s notions of what was to be accepted as normal and what was not. Still, one asked.
‘Now if you’d said him,’ said Hopton unexpectedly, and nodded across the street.
Outside the single hardware shop a young man in a leather jacket of working rather than display cut had just propped a heavy motor-cycle at the pavement’s edge, and was striding towards the shop doorway. A tall, dark young man, perhaps twenty-five, scarcely older, possibly younger; uncovered brown hair very neatly trimmed, a vigorous, confident walk, none of the signs of convulsed adolescence about him. And a striking face, dark and reticent as a gipsy, with a proud, curled, sensitive mouth. He was in the shop only a minute, evidently collecting something which had been ordered and was ready for him, tools of some kind; a gleam of colour and of steel as he stowed the half-swathed bundle in his saddle-bag, straddled the machine with a long, leisurely movement of his whole body from head to toes, kicked it into life, and roared away from the pavement and along the single street. In a few moments he was out of sight.
‘Seen her with him times enough,’ said Hopton, as if that was perfectly to be expected.
‘Have you, indeed! And who is he? I don’t even know him.’
‘Name of Stockwood. He’s another of ’em. See him behind the wheel of the Bentley, and butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Put him astride one of them there BSAs they keep for running up and down to the plantations and the farms, and he sprouts horns. He does look after them, though, I will say that. They come in now and again to be serviced – some rough rides they get, the estate being what it is – and you can tell a machine that’s cared for.’
‘Are you telling me,’ asked George intently, light dawning, ‘that that’s Mrs Blacklock’s chauffeur? Since when? There used to be a thin, grey-haired fellow named Braidie.’
‘Retired about three months ago, and this chap came. Name of Stockwood. I’ve seen him driving the Beck lass home often enough.’
George stood looking thoughtfully after the faint plume of dust that lingered where the rider had vanished. So that was the reliable human machine that guarded Annet from undesirable encounters by regularly driving her home. Pure luck that he should be seen for the first time not with the car, but with one of the estate utilities, and consequently out of strict uniform. Chauffeurs are anonymous, automatic, invisible; but there went a live, feeling and very personable young man. Was it quite impossible that Annet, startled and disarmed by the change from Braidie’s elderly, familiar person, should steal glances along her shoulder in the Bentley, on all those journeys home, and see the man instead of the chauffeur?
‘All right,’ said George, ‘break off. No use going on like this, leave me alone with her.’
He got up from his chair and went to the window of the living-room, and stood staring out vaguely through a mist, as though he had been wearing glasses and steamed them opaque with the heat of his own exhaustion. Sweat ran, slowly and heavily, between his shoulder-blades. Who would have thought she had the strength in her to resist and resist and resist, fending off solicitude as implacably as reproaches? She looked so fragile that you’d have thought she could be broken in the hands; and it seemed she was indestructible and immovable.
He heard them get up obediently and leave the room, Price first with his note-book, that had nothing in it but a record of unanswered questions, then Sergeant Grocott, light-footed, closing the door gently behind him. Mrs Beck had not moved from the chair by the couch.
‘Alone,’ said George.
‘I have a right to be present. Annet is my daughter. If she wants me—’
‘Ask her,’ he said without turning his head, ‘if she wants you.’
‘It’s all right, Mother,’ said Annet, breaking her silence for the third time in two hours. Once she had said: ‘Good morning!’ and once: ‘I’m sorry!’ but after that nothing more. ‘Please!’ she said now. ‘Mr Felse has a right. And I don’t mind.’
The chair shrieked offence on the polished floor. Mrs Beck withdrew; the door closed again with a frigid click, and George and Annet were alone in the room.
He went back to her, and drew a chair close to the studio couch on which she was ensconced in the protective ceremony of convalescence. Mrs Beck, surely, had arranged the tableau, to disarm, to afflict him with a sense of guilt and inhibit him from hectoring her daughter. He doubted if Annet had even noticed. Silent, pale and withdrawn, the small, painful frown fixed on her brow as though she agonised without respite at a problem no one else could help her to solve, she looked full at him while she denied him, as though she saw him from an infinite distance but with particular clarity. Bereft even of her fantasy wedding ring, she clung at least to her silence, an absolute silence now.
‘Annet, listen to me. We know you were there. We’ve got a firm identification of you from two witnesses now. And your ring came from the dead man’s stock. All this is fact. Established. Nobody’s going to shake it now. We know there was a man with you. We know you waited for him on the corner. We know the exact time, and it fits in with the medical estimate of the time the old man died. This is murder. An inoffensive old man, who’d never done anything to you, who didn’t even know you. Who’d never seen his murderer before. Just a chance victim, because the time was right and the street was empty, and there was money just being checked up in the till. A quick profit, and what’s a life or so in the cause? That’s not you, Annet. I know society is dull and censorious and often wrong, I know its values aren’t always the highest. But if you diverge from its standards, it surely isn’t going to be for lower ones. There’s only one thing you can do now, and only one side on which you can range yourself. Tell me what happened. Tell me the whole story.’